Page Models

A page model is an extended version of the default page object. You can create a page model for any type of page you have. By adding additional functionalities to your pages you can simplify your template code and have more powerful control over your page data.

The models directory

Page models go into /site/models. Please create the directory if it's not there yet. Page models are named exactly like the templates they belong to:

Template

Page model

/site/templates/article.php

/site/models/article.php

Kirby will automatically load the page model for your template if it can find one.

Creating a page model

A page model is a PHP class that extends Kirby's default page class. The class name corresponds with the name of the template and text file. So if your text file is called project.txt Kirby will look for a project.php model file with a ProjectPage class.

<?php
// For a content file called `project.txt`
// In general the class name is {{ProjectFileName}}Page
class ProjectPage extends Page {
// all methods of the Page class are inherited and can be overridden here now.
}

This page model will be loaded every time Kirby encounters a page of the given type (so project in this example), whether it is in a template, a snippet or anywhere else.

Page models in the wild

A page model can be used for example to fetch a cover image for a project page. Fetching the right image in the template or snippet can be a couple of lines of code. It is cleaner to seperate this functionality into a page model.

The page model

The page model will make a method called cover() available for all your project pages. It will return the cover image, so you don't have to fetch it in the template code.

By creating the model and the cover method you don't have to repeat that code in every single snippet and template, in which you are dealing with projects. The cover method in this case is pretty short and simple, but imagine this with more complex queries for images or other data. As an additional benefit you can make changes that are reflected throughout all your templates and snippets in a single file.

Overriding the Page class

It is also possible to override the functionality of Kirby's page class. Be careful with this as it is possible to change Kirby's behaviour in unwanted ways!

A simple unintrusive example is to sort all images differently by default.